Asylum

Asylum plays at the Old 505 Theatre from February 3-21 2015. Presented by Apocalypse Theatre Company.

Asylum is important theatre. A collection of rehearsed readings of plays responding to the implementation of the Operation Sovereign Borders policy, it is an evocative mosaic of the issues facing and the lives of those seeking asylum in Australia.

 This is a massive project. Over 65 artists are participating, and the effort that Apocalypse Theatre Company have gone to in order to bring Asylum to the stage is incredible and must be applauded. The season is broken into five blocks of five or six plays each, so it would be possible to attend a number of times and have an entirely different experience.

I saw the second block of plays. There is a tendency for a lot of political theatre to be didactic – which I think would have been more than understandable in this case, given the issue – but the pieces I saw didn't really veer too far in this direction. (As an aside – I think verbatim theatre has become popular in political stories as a way of combating this tendency towards didacticism.) This wasn't a two hour lecture and it wasn't preachy. Instead, it focused on small, human, individual stories – often a much more powerful way of communicating – and on evoking the mythic.

There were some standout pieces in the block I saw. Melita Rowston's Bread and Butter was a beautiful story about an Afghani woman who sought asylum in Australia, and has now finally found happiness and a new family to replace the one the Taliban took from her in the bakery where she works, although she remains haunted by fears that her temporary protection visa will be revoked and she will lose everything. The writing was a tiny bit heavyhanded at times, but any flaws were masked by a luminous, joyous performance by Josipa Draisma, who I could easily watch for hours. Similarly brilliant is Jan Barr in Mary Rachel Brown's Self-Service. This piece – in which Pamela, who works at Woolworths, is forced to deal with her trainee Abdul-Rasheed becoming her boss – manages to be hilarious at the same time as horrifying as Pamela's unthinking casual racism is slowly revealed.

 But I think my favourite piece of the night was Amir Mohammadi's Gol Pari, a distinctly Afghani piece (like, literally – it was translated from Dari the day before the performance) which had a whiff of the mythic about it. It reminded me of the myth of Psyche and her sisters, or Cinderella and her stepsisters, as Pari Gol, the third wife of a rich man, is victimised and falsely accused of immodesty by the other two wives and her community. The most remarkable thing about this piece is its context. Mohammadi is from Afghanistan himself, a radical theatremaker who campaigned for women's rights, illegally rehearsing plays like this one and secretly showing them to an all-female audience. Someone needs to give him a big arts grant immediately, because this is the kind of theatre we need to be seeing – theatre that can bring hope, foster rebellion, and change the world.

Even leaving aside the fact that it is certainly vital and necessary theatre, Asylum is enjoyable theatre. It is evocative, engaging, and incredibly moving, and you should definitely spend your money on it - not least because all profits go to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. 

 

*NB: I’m just about to hand my PhD in, so a more regular reviewing schedule should resume. My apologies if you invited me to something in the last six or so months and I didn’t respond – my inbox got super out of control with thesis revisions. Things are basically back to normal now!

High Windows, Low Doorways

High Windows, Low Doorways (subtlenuance) runs at the Tap Gallery from March 19 – 30. Written by Jonathan Ari Lander, Noelle Janaczewska, Katie Pollock, Alison Rooke, Mark Langham, Ellana Costa and Melita Rowston. Directed by Paul Gilchrist.

High Windows, Low Doorways is a series of monologues loosely focused around the theme of spirituality. Like many of subtlenuance’s productions, it’s layered and complex. There is a lot in this show to mull over. I thought it was beautifully curated and well performed.

 One of the things I liked the way in which the monologues often seemed to be in conversation with each other – not necessarily literally, but thematically. As a result, I thought the best way to write this review was in conversation with my theatre date, my friend Martin.

JODI: Hi Martin.

MARTIN: Hi Jodi.

JODI: So we’ve just been to see High Windows, Low Doorways. Tell me your initial impressions.

MARTIN: Um –

JODI: I won’t put the um in.

MARTIN: No, don’t put the um in.

JODI: Actually, I think ‘um’ might be a good place to begin. When approaching a subject as broad and intimidating as spirituality, our first instinct is often to say ‘um’.

MARTIN: Indeed. I was surprised by the lack of… religious content… or, content I would associate with ‘spirituality’ in my own concept of the term.

JODI: Can you explain that for me a little further?

MARTIN: Um…

JODI: Sorry, I realise this is a totally intimidating exercise. But then, religion is intimidating.

MARTIN: I didn’t identify the characters on stage as spiritual as such or the stories that they were telling as inherently spiritual. And I guess I was expecting people who were more religious in a day to day sense of the word. I think what we got was people explaining aspects of their lives that they loosely associate as spiritual. And… I had a very sort of spiritual childhood and half of my teenage years were the same and… um… yeah. I thought we would experience people who had more of a day to day connection with the spiritual. But it was something else.

JODI: Not being especially spiritual myself, I found the pieces I connected with most were the ones associated with spirituality and childhood – I went to a Catholic primary school and so a lot of that resonated with me very strongly. However, I’m not sure whether spirituality per se was actually what the focus was. I feel like more of it – and maybe this ties into you not feeling the experiences related as particularly spiritual – was more to do with ritual than with actual belief. Would you agree?

MARTIN: Absolutely.

JODI: There’s a concept in Islam that I’ve always quite liked when applied to religion more broadly. They distinguish between islam – the vertical relationship between person and god – and iman – the horizontal relationships between members of a religious community. I feel like what was explored here was much more iman, and I feel like ‘spirituality’ would be much more islam – a personal, rather than communal experience.

MARTIN: Yes. And it is interesting to note that I think every story that was told in this piece of theatre involved someone’s relationship with a family member or friends – in one case, a teacher at school. They all connected with this theme of spirituality through people within their own social or community networks.

JODI: Totally true. One was about a guy and his grandma, another about a Lao girl and her culture, another about an oppressively discriminatory school experience… but not very much about gods or actual personal belief. And I wonder whether that was the thing missing. The only real gesture towards gods we got were hymns, and a lot of the time, they rang quite hollow for me. What did you think?

MARTIN: Yes, I thought of the hymns as theatrical embellishment – a nice way to break up the style of presentation. But not a moment of… spiritual connection or… prayer, I guess? In the way that I’ve experienced it from childhood.

JODI: That was what was missing, wasn’t it? That notion of prayer?

MARTIN: Yes. I would agree with that.

JODI: Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I find it quite interesting that most of the associations with this theme were ritualistic – that is, social – rather than individual or personal. I wanted that notion to be explored more, unpacked and unpicked, I guess. But in this medium, where you have seven different writers creating seven different pieces, I wonder how much room there was to do that.

MARTIN: I see that point of view. And I also – from my own personal experiences, feel like that [individually spiritual] aspect of religion is becoming more and more rare in our society. Personally, I feel that this reflects my own journey that I’ve taken in life away from that personal relationship with gods towards a more communal one.

JODI: I wonder what this says about communities. Do we in fact worship our communities in a religious sense? I don’t really know.

MARTIN: I think that my own personal relationships have replaced for me that thing that the religious aspect of my childhood fulfilled, so I would support that.

JODI: So would the show, I think. There was a lot of loneliness there. Would you agree?

MARTIN: Yes. There was a lot of the single person reflecting on memories of relationships but doing so in such a way that they felt like they were alone even though they were communicating to the audience.

JODI: Personally, I found the piece set in a Christian high school quite affecting, probably because I could relate to it – that basically was my school experience. Were there any that stood out to you in particular?

MARTIN: I did relate to that one as well, having gone to a religious school. I really connected with the story about a person who was having a bad year and kept finding feathers in various places and that moment where she just spills everything in a prayer in a Buddhist temple… I related to that moment where you just break down and spill everything as a last resort as an effective way of dealing with that kind of situation.

JODI: That one took me back to a moment when I was in Malaysia a few years ago and I did something similar – though nowhere near as dramatic. I remember being in a Buddhist temple and hanging a kind of wish ribbon on a tree and just really sincerely imbuing it with wishes about all these worries I had and… it seems quite minor in the scheme of my life, you know, but it was one of those moments that sticks in your mind.

MARTIN: I had a very similar experience in a church in Poland. I do remember it quite vividly… I do think it was a turning point for me. It might have been the last time I really prayed.

JODI: Which is why I found it so interesting that this show focused so much on ritual – rituals stay with us, even if belief does not. I think that was really the common theme echoed throughout, and it resonated with me.

MARTIN: Me too.

JODI: Any closing remarks you want to make about the show?

MARTIN: It’s interesting having a conversation about it because I feel like the impact for me has been felt more on reflection than during the performance. Maybe that’s a credit to the show.

JODI: I think it’s a thought provoking show – maybe not one that you’re glued to the whole time, but definitely one that you have to mull over afterwards. Thank you for chatting with me post-show, Martini.

MARTIN: Pleasure, McAlister.

milkmilklemonade

Milkmilklemonade runs at the New Theatre from February 5-March 2. By Josh Conkel, directed by Melita Rowston.

Milkmilklemonade is at once fantastical and realistic, funny and moving. It is a show with its own language, one that is quite difficult to acclimate to at first. It is a theatrical language, a melodramatic language, a performative language, one which exposes the problem at the heart of the play: how to be yourself when people are telling you that you should be someone else.

Our hero is Emory (Mark Dessaix), a fifth grade boy who lives on a chicken farm with his dying stuck-in-her-ways grandmother (Pete Nettrell). Emory likes dolls and singing and dancing, dreaming of entering a major pageant-style competition with his Barbie Starlene (Leah Donovan, who also plays several other roles) and his best friend, talking chicken Linda (Sarah Easterman). His grandmother, on the other hand, thinks he should do more stereotypically male things. The other key figure in Emory's life is Elliot (Kieran Foster), sometimes a bully, sometimes a friend, a boy who, despite his aggressive insistence on his own masculinity, loves playing house with Emory and fantasises about going to the prom.

In her groundbreaking work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler talks about the problems of gender and performativity. I won't quote her, because her prose is some of the most dense and impenetrable I have ever encountered, but essentially, she argues that gender is not innate but is performed, forcing people into rigid roles that might not necessarily suit them. We see a classic case of this in milkmilklemonade. Unable to adequately perform the masculine role that his grandmother wants him to, Emory escapes into a fantasy world where he can perform the way he wants to. Sometimes he is co-opted into Elliot's dreamworld, queering the domestic fantasy, exposing more problems with gender performance. According to his grandmother, it is his duty to become a stereotypical man. This is horrifying to him, particularly when read alongside the inexorable destiny of the chickens on his farm, which is to die horribly in a monstrous machine. Emory must find a way to perform like he wants to – to create his own theatrical language for interpreting the world –or his identity, his self, will perish.

Milkmilklemonade could have been a big mess. There's always a danger of taking it too far with this kind of wacky, surrealist humour, of letting the absurdity take over the show like an avalanche. While I suspect the show might still be a bit much for some audience members, Melita Rowston has showed remarkable restraint in her deft direction of this piece. By keeping it carefully controlled, Rowston has allowed the wackiness of it to be funny and absorbing without losing sight of the real melancholy at its heart.

While I was a little apprehensive in the early stages, I ended up really enjoying milkmilklemonade(though I was never quite clear on where the title came from). It's at once completely absurd and a thoughtful commentary on the problems of performing identity. It features some great performances and some really clever direction. Definitely the best play I've seen starring a giant chicken!